Did you know? The Ekphrastic Review is based in Canada. July 1 this year marks our country's 150th year birthday.

To honour this landmark occasion, let's celebrate some Canadian art. Here is a surprise ekphrastic challenge, featuring visual art prompts for you to respond to in poetry. (Prose and short fiction also welcome.)

You have ten days! Dive into one piece for inspiration, choose a few, or try them all. Write!

We will consider late works, but please try to send them before Canada Day. On July 1 and throughout the month, to celebrate Canada's birthday with art, we'll post the best submissions.

Our hope is that you will discover more Canadian art and be inspired to delve beyond these images, too. Canadian art history is little known outside of our country, and sadly, sometimes inside of it, too. We have a shorter history than Europe or Africa in terms of visual art, and our numbers are small for such a large nation. We are also notoriously polite and quiet and haven't always promoted our creative wealth because most Canadians don't like to show off. But even so, we have a tremendously interesting variety of visual art, and it deserves more attention and a wider audience.

If you find a Canadian work not shown and want to use it as a prompt for this challenge, please do!

Disclaimer: Please note, this tiny selection does not pretend to be definitive in any way. There are glaring omissions; for example, contemporary art is grossly underrepresented, and no two samples could possibly do justice to the epic variety, imagination, and skill of the diverse First Nations arts with which we have been blessed. Nor are these works specifically the "best" or best known of the particular artist highlighted. I wanted to include many more works from underrated and hardly known painters who should be; I also left out works I love and replaced them with works I don't care for at all, because it's important to contemplate art we don't like, and for prompts for writing, it's important to have an interesting selection, not just a Greatest Hits list.

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All works of art or literature are used with permission of the creator or publisher, OR under public domain, OR under fair use. If any works have been used or credited incorrectly, please alert us so we can fix it!